Shavuot

Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, is kept on the sixth of Sivan, and it is defined by counting: it falls at the end of the Omer, the seven weeks (fifty days) counted from Passover, so that its date is set not independently but by its distance from the Exodus. Its older, biblical meaning is agricultural, the wheat harvest and the offering of the first fruits (bikkurim) in Jerusalem, and it is one of the three pilgrim festivals.

Its more prominent meaning in later Judaism is historical and covenantal: Shavuot became the anniversary of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, the moment Israel received the Law and, in the tradition's understanding, became a covenant people. The link is drawn from the chronology of Exodus, which places the arrival at Sinai in the third month. This gives the festival a strongly intellectual and devotional character quite unlike the harvest feast it began as, and it is now above all the festival of revelation, of Torah received and to be received anew each year.

The best-known custom is the Tikkun Leil Shavuot, staying awake through the first night in study of Torah, a practice popularised by the sixteenth-century kabbalists of Safed and now widespread, in which communities read a set anthology or hear lectures until dawn; it is sometimes explained as making amends for a tradition that Israel overslept on the morning of the Sinai revelation. Synagogues and homes are decorated with greenery and flowers, recalling both the harvest and a tradition that Sinai bloomed, and it is customary to eat dairy foods, for which several symbolic reasons are given.

The synagogue reading includes the Book of Ruth, chosen for its harvest setting and because Ruth's embrace of the God and people of Israel is read as a model of accepting the covenant; some connect it also to King David, traditionally born and died at this season. In many communities Shavuot is when children begin their formal study, and the confirmation of teenagers is a modern addition. Falling fifty days after Passover, it completes the movement from liberation to law: freedom from Egypt reaching its purpose in the receiving of the Torah.